Hard Disk Jukebox

[Daniel]

Brennanis a small British company that makes interesting audio gear that fits a certain genre. They see a need and fill it with a specific product, such as the BB1 I reviewed last year. The Brennan B2 CD Ripper and Hard disk Jukebox is a compact storage device that can store up to 5,000 CDs in high-resolution/lossless format (or 10,000 in MP3 format depending on the file and hard drive size). The B2 will also play those stored CDs over wired speakers, Bluetooth, Wifi, or even the SONOS home sound system. Plus, it will play audio from its built-in CD player, YouTube, any source connected via the AUX port, any available internet radio station, and Bluetooth (with optional Bluetooth 5 dongle).

However, if you have a large CD collection gathering dust, you can back them up to a hard drive and have your whole collection ready to play whenever you want. Plus, you can store the CDs in a safe place and never have to drag them out again.

Along the bottom of the rear panel (left to right) is a DC input for power next to a USB A port used for the Wifi dongle/antenna. This lets the B2 connect wirelessly to a network. That way, it can be accessed either by PC or smart device via the Brennan app (more on that later in the review).

Ripping CDs was as easy as inserting, waiting for the CD to show up in the window (web or smart device UI), and clicking the RIP button. Cover art, song titles, times, and other info you need are automatically placed with the ripped CD for browsing or cataloging later.

When the-gadgeteer was first established, the market was awash with devices like this: Solutions looking for a problem, hodgepodges of hardware and features jammed into a box and sold as the next revolution in technology.

Many home computers in the 1970s and 1980s had two floppy disk drives, or owners bought a second drive, to reduce having to play disk jockey. A second drive was especially popular with Commodore Amiga owners, as many games around 1990s came with several disks (and hard drives were uncommon for that system).

Given that it was rare that a system or program or game would actually need to read from both disk drives at the same time (I can't think of a single example, except for disk copy tools, and even those can easily use the RAM as a buffer), I have been wondering lately if a "jukebox" approach would have been feasible.

I assume the read-head was the most sophisticated and expensive component of disk drives. So imagine a "jukebox" device that has several slots where you can put disks in, and the read head would mechanically move from slot to slot and read from different disks.

Sure it would require some sort of quite sophisticated mechanics and controller logic, but it might still have been less expensive than a second drive. Also such a device could have 5, 10, or even more slots and thus be eventually really "economical", even serving as some sort of "poor man's hard drive", albeit much slower of course.

It was extremely common to have programs using two or more drives. One holding the program disk, so overlays could be loaded according what was to be done (remember, there were no multi megabyte memories holding everything), plus a data disk holding your document(s). Of course there's always the chance to swap disks whenever access to either was needed.

In fact, it's the very reason why the DOS on the IBM-PC emulates a drive B if there is only a single drive available, by managing them as logical drives and checking disk IDs with every access. Doing so allows to handle two different disks without interaction from the program, while avoiding overwriting the wrong one.

Not really, especially early on the mechanicals were the most expensive part. This is also the reason why Processor Technology designed their Helios II drive around he Persci 270 drive - a drive having two disk slots, each with two heads, but only one frame, one drive motor and one stepper motor. The idea was to offer the ability of two drives but cutting cost. Would have worked fine, except the floppy became such a success that, by sheer scale of volume, the price for two single drives fell below what the otherwise simpler mechanicals for the Persci 270 would cost.

Controller wouldn't be a big thing, it's the mechanics. it would need at least another motor, able to stop exactly at multiple positions and rather fine mechanisms to move the disk pack as well as the disks in and out. Such a setup would be way more expensive than a second drive, while at the same time not being able to access two disks concurrently - at least not without several seconds between each change.

No need to warm the Flux Capacitor, such drives have been made, but not for home computers, but professional systems. In fact, they have been around longer than home computers. IBM offered in 1973 the IBM 3540 Diskette Input/Output Unit for their mainframes which could operate up to 20 8" diskettes at once per drive and two drives in maximum configuration (B2). Then again, floppies were already back then way too slow, so IBM had as well IBM 3747 Data Converter, which could autofeed floppies to be copied to tape, which then was transported to the mainframe - they were part of the 3740 Data Entry System.

Similar attempts have been made in the 1980s for 5.25 drives, but were never really successful. It was simply less expensive to go ahead and buy an HDD instead - or, for most home-computer users to go ahead and buy a drive with higher capacity.

The only niche market for auto loader systems were disk copy stations used to manufacture software. But their purpose was to feed a stack of disks one by one, not to select between different disks of that stack. Equally important, they were way outside the price range of home computer users (several thousand USD per station), often self contained and usually HDD based.

An early example for such a mechanic is documented in this patent application of 1982. It feeds a stack of disks from the top and and selects the output into two bins below. Most likely to separate successful writes from failures detected in verify. Some other similar patents from the 1980s

An exception to these production orientated devices might have been some auto loaders for the Mac. The most well known (in the US) maybe the Jukebox Five Automated Disk Changer (video). It allowed to sequence thru a stack of disks, accessing them in sequence, but not random. Useful for installing software, or small scale production. It wasn't software controlled, but relied on the auto eject function of the Mac. whenever a disk was spilled, it was dropped below and the next in line was inserted. The handler was introduced at the 1991 MacWorld Expo by Fifth Generation Systems, a company focusing on backup solution - which benefited a lot from such a device. There were other similar systems as well

The only disk technology where changer systems had a tiny niche with end users were CD changers during the mid 1990s. Like the well renowned Pioneer 602X/604X/624X series, or the later priced Nakamichi MJ-4.8s (4 disks) and MCD-1020 (7 disks). Still, they cost >4 times the price of a single drive professional (read, already expensive) drive. Here again it was a matter of scale - in this case the fact that these drives were originally designed to be used in high end car audio systems, which produced some volume.

There was a product, called I think "Juke Box 5" designed for the Macintosh, which had a hopper on the top that could hold a IIRC about 20 floppies, and was designed to be placed in front of the computer.

Each time the machine ejected a floppy, a battery-powered motor on the device would pull the floppy from the machine and insert the next one from the hopper. If one were either mass-producing floppy disks or were running a backup program, the device would only need to be serviced when necessary to empty the space below the drive and reload the hopper.

As for the mechanical complexity of switching disks versus having more mechanisms, I would expect that the cheapest way to design a "two-disk" drive would be to have one head or pair of heads per disk, but use a single spindle motor and a single stepper motor to operate all of them. The biggest limitation with this approach is that inserting or removing a disk while another disk was being accessed would be likely to cause data corruption.

If the drawers that held disks could be moved up and down, it might be possible to design a head-movement mechanism with enough mechanical range to pull the head completely away from the disk, so as to allow the drawer assembly to be raised and lowered to select a different disk, but one of the big reasons for using two drives was to allow the system to switch quickly between accessing the contents of the disks on them. If the time required for a mechanism to switch disks would exceed the time for a human to do likewise, the device wouldn't be very useful.

There are photos of the "JUKEBOX FIVE" 15 (3 1/2") floppy disk changer from "FIFTH GENERATION SYSTEMS" ("The Publishers of Suitcase II" font software) at reddit with a with a Macintosh SE/30. There is an advertisement on page 185 in the October 1991 edition of [MacUser] on archive.org. This even claims that "...unattended disk backups are a snap."

I was one of those who spent a seeming stupendous amount of money to get twin floppy drives for a 1978 designed "LNW-80" (essentially a TRS-80 model 3 clone). The pair of drives cost more than the computer did.

For a true "jukebox" with only a single drive axle clamp, this would have been about the same, but for an economical mechanism, the disk change time would likely have been worse than a skilled manual operator.

Remember that back then we were relying on mechanical position registration, not like today where moving parts have position feedback that enables pin-point accuracy under software control. So to get reliable positioning at speed you would have spent a lot of money.

An alternative would have been some sort of "shishkebab" single spindle loaded with many floppy disks as a fixed set, somewhat like the multi-platter hard drives of the time. That would have dramatically improved the mechanical registration and time to swap disks, but would have had significantly worse positioning latency.

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